Current Errors Concerning the Law of Association
People cavil much about Ricardo's Law of Association, better known under the name Law of Comparative
Cost.
The reason is obvious.
This law is an offense to all those eager to justify protection and national economic
isolation from any point of view other than the selfish interests of some producers or
for the Issues of War Preparedness.
Ricardo's first aim in expounding this law was to refute an objection raised against
freedom of international trade.
The protectionist asks, what under free trade will be the fate of a country in which the
conditions for any kind of production are less favorable than in all other countries?
Now in a world in which there is free mobility, not only for products, but no less for
For Capital Goods and for Labor, a country so little suited for production would cease
to be used as the seat of any human industry.
If people fare better without exploiting the comparatively unsatisfactory physical conditions
of production offered by this country, they will not settle here and will leave it as
uninhabited as the polar regions, the tundras and the deserts.
But Ricardo deals with a world whose conditions are determined by settlement in earlier days,
a world in which capital goods and labor are bound to the soil by definite institutions.
In such a milieu, free trade, that is, the free mobility of commodities only, cannot
bring about a state of affairs in which capital and labor are distributed on the surface of
of the Earth, according to the better or poorer physical opportunities afforded to the productivity
of labor.
Here the law of comparative cost comes into operation.
Each country turns toward those branches of production for which its conditions offer
comparatively, although not absolutely, the most favorable opportunities.
For the inhabitants of a country, it is more advantageous to abstain from the exploitation
of some opportunities which, absolutely and technologically, are more propitious, and
to import commodities produced abroad under conditions which, absolutely and technologically,
are less favorable than the unused domestic resources.
The case is analogous to that of a surgeon who finds it convenient to employ for the
the Cleaning of the Operating Room and the Instruments, a man whom he excels in this
performance also, and to devote himself exclusively to surgery, in which his superiority is higher.
The theorem of comparative cost is in no way connected with the value theory of classical
economics.
It does not deal with value or with prices.
It is an analytic judgment.
The conclusion is implied in the two propositions that the technically movable factors of production
differ with regard to their productivity in various places and are institutionally restricted
in their mobility.
The theorem, without prejudice to the correctness of its conclusions, can disregard problems
of valuation because it is free to resort to a set of simple assumptions.
These are that only two products are to be produced, that these products are freely movable,
that for the production of each of them two factors are required, that one of these factors,
it may be either labor or capital goods, is identical in the production of both, while
the other factor, a specific property of the soil, is different for each of the two processes.
That the greater scarcity of the factor common to both processes determines the extent of
the exploitation of the different factor.
In the frame of these assumptions, which make it possible to establish substitution ratios
between the expenditure of the common factor and the output, the theorem answers the question
raised.
The law of comparative cost is as independent of the classical theory of value as is the
and the law of returns, which its reasoning resembles.
In both cases, we can content ourselves with comparing only physical input and physical output.
With the law of returns, we compare the output of the same product.
With the law of comparative costs, we compare the output of two different products.
Such a comparison is feasible because we assume that for the production of each of them,
Apart from one specific factor, only non-specific factors of the same kind are required.
Some critics blame the law of comparative cost for this simplification of assumptions.
They believe that the modern theory of value would require a reformulation of the law in
conformity with the principles of subjective value.
Only such a formulation could provide a satisfactory conclusive demonstration.
However, they do not want to calculate in terms of money.
They prefer to resort to those methods of utility analysis which they consider a means
for making value calculations in terms of utility.
It will be shown in the further progress of our investigation that these attempts to eliminate
monetary terms from economic calculation are delusive. Their fundamental assumptions are
untenable and contradictory, and all formulas derived from them are vicious. No method of
economic calculation is possible other than one based on money prices as determined by
the market.
The meaning of the simple assumptions underlying the law of comparative cost is not precisely
be the same for the modern economists as it was for the classical economists.
Some adherents of the classical school considered them as the starting point of a theory of
value in international trade.
We know now that they were mistaken in this belief.
Besides, we realize that with regard to the determination of value and of prices, there
is no difference between domestic and foreign trade.
What makes people distinguish between the home market and markets abroad is only a difference
in the data, that is, varying institutional conditions restricting the mobility of factors
of production and of products.
If we do not want to deal with the law of comparative cost under the simplified assumptions
applied by Ricardo, we must openly employ money calculation.
We must not fall prey to the illusion that a comparison between the expenditure of factors
of production of various kinds and of the output of products of various kinds can be
achieved without the aid of money calculation.
If we consider the case of the surgeon and his handyman, we must say, if the surgeon
can employ his limited working time for the performance of operations for which he is
is compensated at $50 per hour. It is to his interest to employ a handyman to keep his
instruments in good order and to pay him $2 per hour, although this man needs three hours
to accomplish what the surgeon could do in one hour. In comparing the conditions of two
countries, we must say, if conditions are such that in England the production of one
One unit of each of the two commodities, A and B, requires the expenditure of one working
day of the same kind of labor, while in India, with the same investment of capital for A,
two days, and for B, three days are required.
And if capital goods and A and B are freely movable from England to India and vice versa,
While there is no mobility of labor, wage rates in India in the production of A must
tend to be 50% and in the production of B 33.3% of the English rates.
If the English rate is 6 shillings, the rates in India would be the equivalent of 3 shillings
in the production of A and the equivalent of 2 shillings in the production of B. Such
Such a discrepancy in the remuneration of labor of the same kind cannot last if there is mobility
of labor on the domestic Indian labor market.
Workers would shift from the production of B into the production of A. Their migration
would tend to lower the remuneration in the A industry and to raise it in the B industry.
Finally, Indian wage rates would be equal in both industries.
The production of A would tend to expand and to supplant English competition.
On the other hand, the production of B would become unprofitable in India and would have
to be discontinued, while it would expand in England.
The same reasoning is valid if we assume that the difference in the conditions of production
consists also or exclusively in the amount of capital investment needed.
It has been asserted that Ricardo's law was valid only for his age and is of no avail
for our time, which offers other conditions.
Ricardo saw the difference between domestic trade and foreign trade in differences in
the mobility of capital and labor.
If one assumes that capital, labor and products are movable, then there exists a difference
It's between regional and inter-regional trade only as far as the cost of transportation
comes into play.
Then it is superfluous to develop a theory of international trade as distinguished from
national trade.
Capital and labor are distributed on the earth's surface according to the better or poorer
conditions which the various regions offer to production.
There are areas more densely populated and better equipped with capital.
There are others less densely populated and poorer in capital supply.
There prevails on the whole earth a tendency toward an equalization of wage rates for the
same kind of labor.
Ricardo, however, starts from the assumption that there is mobility of capital and labor
only within each country and not between the various countries.
He raises the question what the consequences of the free mobility of products must be under
such conditions.
If there is no mobility of products either, then every country is economically isolated
and autarkic and there is no international trade at all.
The theory of comparative cost answers this question.
Now Ricardo's assumptions by and large held good for his age.
Later, in the course of the 19th century, conditions changed.
The immobility of capital and labor gave way.
International transfer of capital and labor became more and more common.
Then came a reaction.
Today capital and labor are again restricted in their mobility.
The theory, again, corresponds to the Ricardian assumptions.
However, the teachings of the classical theory of interregional trade are above any change
in institutional conditions.
They enable us to study the problems involved under any imaginable assumptions.
5.
The Effects of the Division of Labor.
The division of labor is the outcome of man's conscious reaction to the multiplicity of
natural conditions.
On the other hand, it is itself a factor bringing about differentiation.
It assigns to the various geographic areas specific functions in the complex of the processes
of production.
It makes some areas urban, others rural.
It locates the various branches of manufacturing, mining and agriculture in different places.
Still more important, however, is the fact that it intensifies the innate inequality
of men.
Exercise and practice of specific tasks adjust individuals better to the requirements of
their performance.
Men develop some of their inborn faculties and stunt the development of others.
Vocational types emerge.
The Division of Labor splits the various processes of production into minute tasks, many of which can be performed by mechanical devices.
It is this fact that made the use of machinery possible and brought about the amazing improvements in technical methods of production.
Mechanization is the fruit of the division of labor, its most beneficial achievement,
not its motive and fountain spring.
Power-driven specialized machinery could be employed only in a social environment under the division of labor.
Every step forward on the road toward the use of more specialized, more refined and more productive machines requires a further specialization of tasks.
6. The Individual Within Society
If praxeology speaks of the solitary individual acting on his own behalf only and independent
of fellow men, it does so for the sake of a better comprehension of the problems of
social cooperation.
We do not assert that such isolated, autarkic human beings have ever lived, and that the
social stage of man's history was preceded by an age of independent individuals roaming
Man is a fictitious construction.
Seen from the point of view of the individual, society is the great means for the attainment
of all his ends.
The preservation of society is an essential condition of any plans an individual may want
to realize by any action whatever.
Even the refractory delinquent, who fails to adjust his conduct to the requirements
of life within the societal system of cooperation, does not want to miss any of the advantages
derived from the division of labor.
He does not consciously aim at the destruction of society.
He wants to lay his hands on a greater portion of the jointly produced wealth than the social
order assigns to him.
He would feel miserable if antisocial behavior were to become universal and its inevitable
outcome, the return to primitive indigence, resulted.
It is illusory to maintain that individuals, in renouncing the alleged blessings of a fabulous
in the favourite state of nature and entering into society, have forgone some advantages
and have a fair claim to be indemnified for what they have lost.
The idea that anybody would have fared better under an asocial state of mankind and is wronged
by the very existence of society is absurd.
Thanks to the higher productivity of social cooperation, the human species has multiplied
would far beyond the margin of subsistence offered by the conditions prevailing in ages
with a rudimentary degree of the division of labor.
Each man enjoys a standard of living much higher than that of his savage ancestors.
The natural condition of man is extreme poverty and insecurity.
It is romantic nonsense to lament the passing of the happy days of primitive barbarism.
In a state of savagery, the complainants would either not have reached the age of manhood,
or if they had, they would have lacked the opportunities and amenities provided by civilization.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frederic Engels, if they had lived in the primitive state which
they describe with nostalgic yearning, would not have enjoyed the leisure required for
their studies and for the writing of their books.
One of the privileges which society affords to the individual is the privilege of living
in spite of sickness or physical disability.
Sick animals are doomed.
Their weakness handicaps them in their attempts to find food and to repel aggression on the
part of other animals.
Deaf, nearsighted or crippled savages must perish.
But such defects do not deprive a man of the opportunity to adjust himself to life in society.
The majority of our contemporaries are afflicted with some bodily deficiencies which biology considers pathological.
Our civilization is to a great extent the achievement of such men.
The eliminative forces of natural selection are greatly reduced under social conditions.
Hence, some people say that civilization tends to deteriorate the hereditary qualities of the members of society.
Such judgments are reasonable if one looks at mankind with the eyes of a breeder intent
upon raising a race of men equipped with certain qualities.
But society is not a stud farm operated for the production of a definite type of men.
There is no natural standard to establish what is desirable and what is undesirable
in the biological evolution of man.
Any standard chosen is arbitrary, purely subjective, in short, a judgment of value. The terms racial
improvement and racial degeneration are meaningless when not based on definite plans for the future
of mankind. It is true, civilized man is adjusted to life in society and not to that of a hunter
in virgin forests.
The Fable of the Mystic Communion
The praxeological theory of society is assailed by the fable of the mystic communion.
Society, assert the supporters of this doctrine, is not the product of man's purposeful action.
It is not cooperation and division of tasks.
It stems from unfathomable depths, from an urge ingrained in man's essential nature.
It is, says one group, engrossment by the spirit, which is divine reality, and participation,
by virtue of a unio mystica, in God's power and love.
Another group sees society as a biological phenomenon.
It is the work of the voice of the blood, the bond uniting the offspring of common ancestors
with these ancestors and with one another, and the mystical harmony between the plowman
and the Soil He Tills.
That such psychical phenomena are really felt is true.
There are people who experience the Unio Mystica and place this experience above everything
else, and there are men who are convinced that they hear the voice of the blood and
smell with heart and soul the unique scent of the cherished soil of their country.
The mystical experience and the ecstatic rapture are facts which psychology must consider real,
like any other psychical phenomenon.
The error of the communion doctrines does not consist in their assertion that such phenomena
really occur, but in the belief that they are primary facts, not dependent on any rational
consideration.
The voice of the blood which brings the father close to his child was not heard by those
savages who did not know the causal relation between cohabitation and pregnancy.
Today, as this relation is known to everybody, a man who has full confidence in his wife's
fidelity may perceive it.
But if there are doubts concerning the wife's fidelity, the voice of the blood is of no
use.
Nobody ever ventured to assert that doubts concerning paternity could be resolved by
the voice of the blood.
A mother who has kept watch over her child since its birth can hear the voice of the
blood.
If she loses touch with the infant at an early date, she may later identify it by some bodily
marks, for instance those moles and scars which once were popular with novel writers.
But the blood is mute if such observations and the conclusions derived from them do not
make it speak.
The voice of the blood, contend the German racists, mysteriously unifies all members
of the German people.
But anthropology reveals the fact that the German nation is a mixture of the descendants
of various races, subraces and strains, and not a homogeneous stock descended from a common
ancestry.
The recently Germanized Slav, who has only a short time since changed his paternal family
name for a German-sounding name, believes that he is substantially attached to all Germans.
But he does not experience any such inner urge impelling him to join the ranks of his
brothers or cousins who remained Czechs or Poles.
The voice of the blood is not an original and primordial phenomenon.
It is prompted by rational considerations.
Because a man believes that he is related to other people by a common ancestry, he develops
those feelings and sentiments which are poetically described as the voice of the blood.
The same is true with regard to religious ecstasy and the mysticism of the soil.
The unio mystica of the devout mystic is conditioned by familiarity with the basic
teachings of his religion.
Only a man who has learned about the greatness and glory of God can experience direct communion
with Him.
Mysticism of the soil is connected with the development of definite geopolitical ideas.
Thus it may happen that inhabitants of the plains or the seashore include in the image
of the soil with which they claim to be fervently joined and united, mountain districts which
are unfamiliar to them, and to whose conditions they could not adapt themselves, only because
this territory belongs to the political body of which they are members, or would like to
be members.
On the other hand, they often fail to include in this image of the soil, whose voice they
claim to hear, neighboring areas of a geographic structure very similar to that of their own
History, if these areas happen to belong to a foreign nation.
The various members of a nation or linguistic group and the clusters they form are not always
united in friendship and goodwill.
The history of every nation is a record of mutual dislike and even hatred between its
subdivisions.
Think of the English and the Scotch, the Yankees and the Southerners, the Prussians and the
Bavarians.
It was ideologies that overcame such animosities and inspired all members of a nation or linguistic
group with those feelings of community and belonging together which present-day nationalists
consider a natural and original phenomenon.
The mutual sexual attraction of male and female is inherent in man's animal nature and independent
of any thinking and theorizing.
It is permissible to call it original, vegetative, instinctive, or mysterious.
There is no harm in asserting metaphorically that it makes one being out of two.
We may call it a mystic communion of two bodies, a community.
However, neither cohabitation nor what precedes it and follows generates social cooperation
and societal modes of life.
The animals, too, join together in mating, but they have not developed social relations.
Family life is not merely a product of sexual intercourse.
It is by no means natural and necessary that parents and children live together in the
way in which they do in the family.
The mating relation need not result in a family organization.
The human family is an outcome of thinking, planning and acting.
It is this very fact which distinguishes it radically from those animal groups which we
call per analogium, animal families.
The mystical experience of communion or community is not the source of societal relations but
their product.
The counterpart of the fable of the mystical communion is the fable of a natural and original
repulsion between races or nations.
It is asserted that an instinct teaches man to distinguish congeners from strangers and
to detest the latter.
Millions of noble races abominate any contact with members of lower races.
To refute this statement, one need only mention the fact of racial mixture.
As there are in present-day Europe no pure stocks, we must conclude that between members
of the various stocks which once settled in that continent, there was sexual attraction
and not repulsion.
Races of mulattoes and other half-breeds are living counter-evidence to the assertion that
there exists a natural repulsion between the various races.
Like the mystical sense of communion, racial hatred is not a natural phenomenon innate
in man.
It is the product of ideologies.
But even if such a thing as a natural and inborn hatred between various races existed,
It would not render social cooperation futile and would not invalidate Ricardo's Theory
of Association.
Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment
to love one another.
People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love
one another.
They cooperate because this best serves their own interests.
Neither love, nor charity, nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness
is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to
respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men, and to substitute peaceful collaboration
for enmity and conflict.
7.
THE GREAT SOCIETY
But every inter-human relation is a social relation.
When groups of men rush upon one another in a war of outright extermination, when men
fight against men as mercilessly as they crush pernicious animals and plants, there is between
the fighting parties reciprocal effect and mutual relation, but no society.
Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's
success as a means for the attainment of his own.
The struggles in which primitive hordes and tribes fought one another for watering places,
hunting and fishing grounds, pastures and booty, were such pitiless wars of annihilation.
They were total wars.
So in the nineteenth century were the first encounters of Europeans with the Aborigines
of territories newly made accessible.
But already in the primeval age, long before the time of which historical records convey
information, another mode of procedure began to develop.
People preserved even in warfare some rudiments of social relations previously established.
In fighting against peoples with whom they never before had had any contact, they began
to take into account the idea that between human beings, notwithstanding their immediate
and Enmity, a later arrangement and cooperation is possible. Wars were waged to hurt the
foe, but the hostile acts were no longer merciless and pitiless in the full sense of these terms.
The belligerents began to respect certain limits, which in a struggle against men, as
differentiated from that against beasts, should not be transcended. Above the implacable hatred
and the Frenzy of Destruction and Annihilation, a societal element, began to prevail.
The idea emerged that every human adversary should be considered as a potential partner
in a future cooperation, and that this fact should not be neglected in the conduct of
military operations.
War was no longer considered the normal state of inter-human relations.
People recognize that peaceful cooperation is the best means to carry on the struggle
for biological survival.
We may even say that as soon as people realize that it is more advantageous to enslave the
defeated than to kill them, the warriors, while still fighting, gave thought to the
aftermath, the peace.
Enslavement was, by and large, a preliminary step toward cooperation.
The ascendancy of the idea that even in war, not every act is to be considered permissible,
that there are legitimate and illicit acts of warfare, that there are laws, that is,
societal relationships which are above all nations, even above those momentarily fighting
one another, has finally established the Great Society, embracing all men and all nations.
The various regional societies were merged into one ecumenical society.
Belligerents who do not wage war savagely in the manner of beasts, but according to
human and social rules of warfare, renounce the use of some methods of destruction in
order to attain the same concessions on the part of their foes.
As far as such rules are complied with, social relations exist between the fighting parties.
The hostile acts themselves are not only asocial, but antisocial.
It is a mistake to define the term social relationships in such a way as to include
actions which aim at other people's annihilation and at the frustration of their actions.
Where the only relations between men are those directed at mutual detriment, there is neither
society nor societal relations.
Society is not merely interaction.
There is interaction, reciprocal influence, between all parts of the universe, between
the wolf and the sheep he devours, between the germ and the man it kills, between the
The Falling Stone and the Thing Upon Which It Falls Society, on the other hand, always
involves men acting in cooperation with other men in order to let all participants attain
their own ends.
8.
The Instinct of Aggression and Destruction It has been asserted that man is a beast of
of Prey whose inborn natural instincts impel him to fight, to kill and to destroy.
Civilization in creating unnatural humanitarian laxity which alienates man from his animal
origin has tried to quell these impulses and appetites.
It has made civilized man a decadent weakling who is ashamed of his animality and proudly
calls his depravity true humaneness.
In order to prevent further degeneration of the species man, it is imperative to free
him from the pernicious effects of civilization.
For civilization is merely a cunning invention of inferior men.
These underlings are too weak to be a match for the vigorous heroes.
They are too cowardly to endure the well-deserved punishment of complete annihilation.
And they are too lazy and too insolent to serve the masters as slaves.
Thus they have resorted to a tricky makeshift.
They have reversed the eternal standards of value, absolutely fixed by the immutable laws
of the universe.
They have propagated a morality which calls their own inferiority, virtue, and the eminence
of the noble heroes, vice.
This moral rebellion of the slaves must be undone by a transvaluation of all values.
The ethics of the slaves, this shameful product of the resentment of weaklings, must be entirely
discarded.
The ethics of the strong, or, properly speaking, the nullification of any ethical restriction,
must be substituted for it.
One must become a worthy scion of his ancestors, the noble beasts of days gone by.
It is usual to call such doctrines social or sociological Darwinism.
We need not decide here whether this terminology is appropriate or not.
At any rate, it is a mistake to assign the epithets evolutionary and biological to teachings
are the conditions which blithely disparage the whole of mankind's history from the ages in which man began to lift himself above the purely animal existence of his non-human ancestors as a continuous progression toward degeneration and decay.
Biology does not provide any standard for the appraisal of changes occurring within living beings other than whether or not these changes succeeded in adjusting the individuals to the conditions of their environment, and thereby in improving their chances in the struggle for survival.
It is a fact that civilization, when judged from this point of view, is to be considered a benefit and not an evil.
It has enabled man to hold his own in the struggle against all other living beings, both the big beasts of prey and the even more pernicious microbes.
It has multiplied man's means of sustenance. It has made the average man taller, more agile and more versatile, and it has stretched his average length of life.
It has given man the uncontested mastery of the earth.
It has multiplied population figures and raised the standard of living to a level never dreamed
of by the crude cave dwellers of prehistoric ages.
It is true that this evolution stunted the development of certain knacks and gifts which
were once useful in the struggle for survival and have lost their usefulness under changed
conditions.
On the other hand, it developed other talents and skills which are indispensable for life
within the frame of society.
However, a biological and evolutionary view must not cavil at such changes.
For primitive man, hard fists and pugnacity were as useful as the ability to be clever
at arithmetic and to spell correctly are for modern man.
It is quite arbitrary, and certainly contrary to any biological standard, to call only those
characteristics which were useful to primitive man natural and adequate to human nature,
and to condemn the talents and skills badly needed by civilized man as marks of degeneration
and biological deterioration.
To advise man to return to the physical and intellectual features of his prehistoric ancestors
is no more reasonable than to ask him to renounce his upright gait and to grow a tail again.
It is noteworthy that the men who were foremost in extolling the eminence of the savage impulses
of our barbarian forefathers were so frail that their bodies would not have come up to
the requirements of dangerous living.
Nietzsche, even before his mental breakdown, was so sickly that the only climate he could
stand was that of the Engadine Valley and of some Italian districts.
He would not have been in a position to accomplish his work if civilized society had not protected
his delicate nerves against the roughness of life.
The apostles of violence wrote their books under the sheltering roof of bourgeois security
which they derided and disparaged.
They were free to publish their incendiary sermons because the liberalism which they
They Scorned Safeguarded Freedom of the Press.
They would have been desperate if they had had to forego the blessings of the civilization
scorned by their philosophy.
And what a spectacle was that timid writer Georges Sorrel, who went so far in his praise
of brutality as to blame the modern system of education for weakening man's inborn tendencies
toward violence.
One may admit that in primitive man the propensity for killing and destroying and the disposition
for cruelty were innate.
We may also assume that under the conditions of earlier ages the inclination for aggression
and murder was favorable to the preservation of life.
Man was once a brutal beast.
There is no need to investigate whether prehistoric man was a carnivore or an herbivore.
But one must not forget that he was physically a weak animal.
He would not have been a match for the big beasts of prey if he had not been equipped
with a peculiar weapon, reason.
The fact that man is a reasonable being, that he therefore does not yield without inhibitions
to every impulse, but arranges his conduct according to reasonable deliberation, must
should not be called unnatural from a zoological point of view.
Rational conduct means that man, in face of the fact that he cannot satisfy all his impulses,
desires and appetites, forgoes the satisfaction of those which he considers less urgent.
In order not to endanger the working of social cooperation, man is forced to abstain from
from satisfying those desires whose satisfaction would hinder establishment of societal institutions.
There is no doubt that such a renunciation is painful.
However, man has made his choice.
He has renounced the satisfaction of some desires incompatible with social life and
has given priority to the satisfaction of those desires which can be realized only or
are in a more plentiful way under a system of the division of labor.
He has entered upon the way toward civilization, social cooperation and wealth.
This decision is not irrevocable and final.
The choice of the fathers does not impair the son's freedom to choose.
They can reverse the resolution.
Every day they can proceed to the transvaluation of values and prefer barbarism to civilization,
or as some authors say, the soul to the intellect, myths to reason and violence to peace.
But they must choose.
It is impossible to have things incompatible with one another.
Science from the point of view of its valuational neutrality does not blame the apostles of the
gospel of violence for praising the frenzy of murder and the mad delights of sadism.
Few judgments are subjective, and liberal society grants to everybody the right to express
his sentiments freely.
Civilization has not extirpated the original tendency toward aggression, bloodthirstiness
and cruelty which characterized primitive man.
In many civilized men they are dormant and burst forth as soon as the restraints developed
by civilization give way.
After the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, the newspapers continually
report abominable crimes manifesting the latent urges toward bestiality.
The most popular novels and moving pictures are those dealing with bloodshed and violent
acts.
Bullfights and cockfights attract large crowds.
If an author says, The rabble thirst for blood, and I with them, he may be no less right than
in Asserting that Primitive Man, too, took delight in killing.
But he errs if he passes over the fact that the satisfaction of such sadistic desires
impairs the existence of society, or if he asserts that true civilization and the good
society are an achievement of people blithely indulging in their passion for violence, murder
and Cruelty, that the repression of the impulses toward brutality endangers mankind's evolution,
and that a substitution of barbarism for humanitarianism would save man from degeneration.
The social division of labor and cooperation rests upon conciliatory settlement of disputes.
Not war, as Heraclitus said, but peace is the source of all social relations.
To man desires other than that for bloodshed are inborn.
If he wants to satisfy these other desires he must forgo his urge to kill.
He who wants to preserve life and health as well and as long as possible must realize
that respect for other people's lives and health better serves his aim than the opposite
mode of conduct.
One may regret that such is the state of affairs, but no such lamentations can alter the hard
facts.
It is useless to censure this statement by referring to irrationality.
All instinctive impulses defy examination by reason because reason deals only with the
means for attaining ends sought, and not with ultimate ends.
But what distinguishes man from other animals is precisely that he does not yield without
any will of his own to an instinctive urge.
Man uses reason in order to choose between the incompatible satisfactions of conflicting
desires.
One must not tell the masses, indulge in your urge for murder.
It is genuinely human and best serves your well-being.
One must tell them, if you satisfy your thirst for blood, you must forgo many other desires.
You want to eat, to drink, to live in fine homes, to clothe yourselves, and a thousand
other things, which only society can provide.
You cannot have everything.
You must choose.
The dangerous life and the frenzy of sadism may please you, but they are incompatible
with the security and plenty which you do not want to miss either.
Praxeology as a science cannot encroach upon the individual's right to choose and to act.
The final decisions rest with acting men, not with the theorists.
Science's contribution to life and action does not consist in establishing value judgments,
in Clarification of the Conditions Under Which Man Must Act and in Elucidation of the Effects
of Various Modes of Action.
It puts at the disposal of acting man all the information he needs in order to make
his choices in full awareness of their consequences.
It prepares an estimate of cost and yield, as it were.
It would fail in this task if it were to omit from this statement one of the items which
Which Could Be of Influence in People's Choices and Decisions
Current Misinterpretations of Modern Natural Science, Especially of Darwinism
Some present-day anti-liberals, both of the right-wing and of the left-wing variety, base
their teachings on misinterpretations of the achievements of modern biology.
1.
Men Are Unequal
Eighteenth-century liberalism and likewise present-day egalitarianism start from the
self-evident truth that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights.
However, say the advocates of a biological philosophy of society, natural science has
demonstrated in an irrefutable way that men are different.
There is no room left in the framework of an experimental observation of natural phenomena
for such a concept as natural rights.
Nature is unfeeling and insensible with regard to any being's life and happiness.
Nature is iron necessity and regularity.
It is metaphysical nonsense to link together the slippery and vague notion of liberty and
the unchangeable, absolute laws of cosmic order.
Thus, the fundamental idea of liberalism is unmasked as a fallacy.
Now it is true that the liberal and democratic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries drew
a great part of its strength from the doctrine of natural law and the innate, imprescriptible
rights of the individual.
These ideas, first developed by ancient philosophy and Jewish theology, permeated Christian thinking.
Some anti-Catholic sects made them the focal point of their political programs.
A long line of eminent philosophers substantiated them.
They became popular and were the most powerful moving force in the pro-democratic evolution.
They are still supported today.
Their advocates do not concern themselves with the incontestable fact that God or nature
did not create men equal, since many are born hale and hearty, while others are crippled
and deformed.
With them, all differences between men are due to education, opportunity and social institutions.
But the teachings of utilitarian philosophy and classical economics have nothing at all
to do with the doctrine of natural right.
With them, the only point that matters is social utility.
They recommend popular government, private property, tolerance and freedom, not because
they are natural and just, but because they are beneficial.
The core of Ricardo's philosophy is the demonstration that social cooperation and division of labor
between men who are in every regard superior and more efficient, and men who are in every
regard inferior and less efficient, is beneficial to both groups.
Anthem, the radical, shouted, Natural rights is simple nonsense.
Natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense.
With him, the sole object of government ought to be the greatest happiness of the greatest
possible number of the community.
Accordingly, in investigating what ought to be right, he does not care about preconceived
Ideas Concerning God's or Nature's Plans and Intentions Forever Hidden to Mortal Men.
He is intent upon discovering what best serves the promotion of human welfare and happiness.
Malthus showed that nature, in limiting the means of subsistence, does not accord to any
living being a right of existence, and that by indulging heedlessly in the natural impulse
In the course of proliferation, man would never have risen above the verge of starvation.
He contended that human civilization and well-being could develop only to the extent that man
learn to reign his sexual appetites by moral restraint.
The utilitarians do not combat arbitrary government and privileges because they are against natural
law, but because they are detrimental to prosperity.
They recommend equality under the civil law not because men are equal, but because such
a policy is beneficial to the commonweal.
In rejecting the illusory notions of natural law and human equality, modern biology only
repeated what the utilitarian champions of liberalism and democracy long before had taught
in a much more persuasive way.
It is obvious that no biological doctrine can ever invalidate what utilitarian philosophy
says about the social utility of democratic government, private property, freedom and
equality under the law.
The present-day prevalence of doctrines approving social disintegration and violent conflict
is not the result of an alleged adaptation of social philosophy to the findings of biology,
of the Almost Universal Rejection of Utilitarian Philosophy and Economic Theory.
People have substituted an ideology of irreconcilable class conflict and international conflict
for the orthodox ideology of the harmony of the rightly understood, that is, long-run
interests of all individuals, social groups and nations.
Darwin are fighting one another because they are convinced that the extermination and liquidation
of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.
2.
The Social Implications of Darwinism
The theory of evolution as expounded by Darwin, says a school of social Darwinism, has clearly
demonstrated that in nature there are no such things as peace and respect for the lives
In nature there is always struggle and merciless annihilation of the weak who do not succeed in defending themselves.
Liberalism's plans for eternal peace, both in domestic and in foreign relations, are the outcome of an illusory rationalism contrary to the natural order.
However, the notion of the struggle for existence, as Darwin borrowed it from Malthus and applied it in his theory,
in his theory is to be understood in a metaphorical sense. Its meaning is that a living being
actively resists the forces detrimental to its own life. This resistance, if it is to
succeed, must be appropriate to the environmental conditions in which the being concerned has
to hold its own. It need not always be a war of extermination, such as in the relations
Reasons Between Men and Morbific Microbes
Reason has demonstrated that for man the most adequate means of improving his condition
is social cooperation and division of labor.
They are man's foremost tool in his struggle for survival.
But they can work only where there is peace.
Wars, civil wars and revolutions are detrimental to man's success in the struggle for existence
3. Reason and Rational Behavior are Unnatural
Christian theology deprecated the animal functions of man's body and depicted the soul as something
outside of all biological phenomena. In an excessive reaction against this philosophy,
Some moderns are prone to disparage everything in which man differs from other animals.
In their eyes, human reason is inferior to the animal instincts and impulses.
It is unnatural and therefore bad.
With them, the terms rationalism and rational behavior have an approprious connotation.
The perfect man, the real man, is a being who obeys his primordial instincts more than
and His Reason.
The obvious truth is that reason, man's most characteristic feature, is also a biological
phenomenon.
It is neither more nor less natural than any other feature of the species Homo sapiens,
For instance, the upright gait, or the hairless skin.